CERN Plans Its Gen-Next Particle Collider

CERN scientists are planning a next-generation circular collider with a circumference of 80 to 100km which will be much more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider that discovered the 'God particle'. The Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said the time has come to look even further ahead.

CERN is now initiating an exploratory study for a future longterm project centred on a circular collider with a much bigger circumference. A worthy successor to the LHC, such an accelerator would allow particle physicists to push back the boundaries of knowledge even further, CERN said. The LHC, which identified the Higgs boson particle in 2012, is housed in a 27km tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

The accelerator is currently undergoing an upgrade that will see its collision energies reaching up to 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV).

The Future Circular Colliders (FCC) programme will focus especially on studies for a hadron collider capable of reaching unprecedented energies in the region of 100 TeV. The FCC study will be conducted over the next five years and starts with an international kickoff meeting at the University of Geneva from February 12 to 15.

The FCC will run in parallel with another study that has been under way for years, the Compact Linear Collider, or "CLIC" , another option for a future accelerator. The CLIC study is aimed at exploring the potential of a linear collider based on a novel accelerating technology. The two studies will produce conceptual design reports by 2018 to 2019.